


Those Are Pearls That Were Her Eyes

by archea2



Category: Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
Genre: Creepy General Tilney, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Gothic, Happy Ending, Magical Artifacts, Romance, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 02:33:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17255987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: Henry knows the second Eleanor comes down to dinner in white, Father’s order, carrying the pearls. They pool into the cup of her hands and overflow, so many of them, hanging in long threads of white. She is rubbing them and blowing on them, their hard chilled light like moonglow - the eerie side of silver .“They were Mother’s,” she tells Henry when he waylays her at the dining-parlour door. “Given to her by her father. They are... exceedingly cold.”





	Those Are Pearls That Were Her Eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aurilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/gifts).



> Dear Aurilly,  
> A late treat for an interesting rarepair! I tried to juggle your “take them to a dark, creepy place but give them a happy ending” prompt with a touch of magical realism. Here’s the result, with my best wishes for the new year.

_I am sure Mrs. Tilney is dead, because Mrs. Hughes told me there was a very beautiful set of pearls that Mr. Drummond gave his daughter on her wedding-day and that Miss Tilney has got now, for they were put by for her when her mother died._

 

On their wedding breakfast (a tete-à-tete affair, no busybodies let in, and taken at twelve _sharp_ ) General Tilney catches a ray of sun on his bride’s face, kindling a double flash of kingfisher blue. “I must have you painted,” he says, and “Pray do not move” when she winces.

The painter comes at last, but his client likes not what he sees. His wife’s canvas eyes are too waterish - leaden - nay, mackerel grey, damn it. The fellow is a hack, an ignoramus - he cannot hope to reproduce the gaze found and held by the General on that early day, to say nothing of the nights when he bends his head low to suck at their light, even as he pushes himself into her. The painter is sent away; the General, a stoic at heart, prepares to be content with the original. But just as he is telling her so, while tilting up her head from the pillow to inspect  that pale expanse of sky and nerves, her eyes close. Then open again, to fix themselves past his, on some point beyond and out of the General’s jurisdiction, there to abide.

The General rings violently.

“Not you, Frederick” - he’s never wasted drawing lessons on his heir apparent, who cannot see past a red coat and a pink bonnet. “Go seek your brother, and have him fetch his box of colours.”

And thus the wake, a silent threesome with more and more tapers brought in to impress upon Henry the exact shade of blue he is to copy. The light  pinpoints the shudder of his fingers, blotching his pencil’s every attempt at a round O, until the General consults his clock, time is of the essence, you d____ fool, can’t you see? _Can’t_ you? Perhaps he shouldn’t have sent Eleanor away - perhaps it takes one woman’s eye to do justice to another’s -

Henry’s fingers freeze. Then, quietly, flawlessly, get to work.

By the time the last azure tint clouds up the water in his glass, his mother’s pupils have clouded up in sympathy, glassy now, mortis rigor hard upon her. She goes to her grave open-eyed, and the ivory miniature with the bluest eye on it goes to the General: the quintessential she, pared down enough that he can fit her into his fob watch and wear her on his heart. Eleanor returns for the funeral, and it irks him to see her chin and young mouth turn just so towards Henry, even as she curtsies to her father. To watch the boy’s stiff face be made tender, his tongue unlocked once again by her mere presence. Henry consoles _her_ , pours his warmth and wit into  _her_ ear (barely pausing through the vicar’s address), with a desperation of life that shocks his sister - but shocks her out of grief’s paralytic.

The General dismisses them from his mind. Let them stand close -; let the boy wrap his hand, defiantly bare, around her gloved palm -; let them pitch their dark weeds against his and Frederick’s regimental reds. He has his ivory solace.

But his daughter is walking up to him, readying herself to take her place at the chief mourner’s side, and the July sky at her back envelops her face; brings out the clear radiance of her eyes. Ivory, after all, is brittle.

“Eleanor,” he says, once for himself (her mother’s name), and once, his voice at the loudest, for her. “Tomorrow at five, when our guests are departed, I shall have something for you. Do not keep me waiting.”

 

* * *

 

Henry knows the second Eleanor comes down to dinner, clad in white (Father’s order) and carrying the pearls. They pool into the cup of her hands and overflow, so many of them, hanging in long threads of white. She is rubbing them and blowing on them, their hard chilled light like moonglow - the eerie side of silver. “They were Mother’s,” she tells Henry when he waylays her at the dining-parlour door. “Given to her by her father. They are... exceedingly cold.” 

“Ah. Here I am, once again catching your ignorance red-handed.” Her hands to his mouth, which relays his warm breath to their red knuckles. When a child, he used to blow on her cheeks at the Christmas service; on her porridge at breakfast-time, until sent away from the table. “Aren’t all proper young ladies taught that pearls grow dead unless worn next to the skin? Here - give them to me.”

“I bow to your wisdom”, Eleanor whispers right back, “but cannot have you play Eastern  pasha for my sake. What if you took a liking to it? An easy conjecture, in your case.” And a palpable hit, which Henry’s sister - to Henry’s delight -  carries on mercilessly. “Will you demand a ruby for your brow, next - or peacocks to drive your curricle? An elephant to carry you to town on an ivory...”

Her voice falters, and, as if in sympathy, his hands still. They have been lifting the pearls to slip them around his neck, his cravat loosened and pushed aside, but as the four main threads uncoil to hang in the air, so does the locket that holds them together. The ivory portrait, its oval mimicked in the curve of that one eyebrow, fringed with pearls so uniformly white that they, too, look like ghost eyes - grown and multiplied in the wake of that wake. 

“Our father gave you _this_?”

Eleanor cannot, will not answer, so Henry takes his gesture to its close, locking the thin gold clasp round his own neck and the locket to his throat, covering its hidden, mutinous pulse. Because it lacks a quarter to breakfast hour, by the time the General steps down all charm and manners, the pearls have been revived to a creamy glow and Eleanor barely feels their weight.

Henry can still feel Eleanor’s light kiss to his throat.

“Excellent, excellent,” the General says happily. “Eleanor, the table-end. You are mistress of the house, now - let us see you at your rightful place.”

 

* * *

 

The summer is hot and everywhere, though Eleanor tries to remind herself that it only comes once a year. The sky over Northanger Abbey never seems to change - always that heavy, monotonous blue filled with a light that envelops her white gown, wherever she goes, and makes her visible to Father.

However, there is an exception to the light. There is a walk, her favourite, shadowed by the old Scotch firs. Father never takes it - Father favours the sunlight - but Henry meets her there whenever they can. The firs’ darkness is a shelter, where they can leave her pearls in the moss and tease each other; dip their heads and raise their chins as they quip, a vocal romp, a mating dance, an exorcism. Henry takes the lead, as he is wont to do, but she circles him easily and calls him a great brute until he laughs and begs for a truce, his brown face under hers, blending into the beautiful shades. Sometimes, it feels to Eleanor that Henry is a tree, too, bursting into flight after flight of green fancy and casting the liveliest shadow of all.  

“You are nothing like Father,” she muses once, on their quick-found ceasefire. She knows that all his teasing is directed not at hurting her, but at making her stand up to him.

“Well, you are nothing like Mother,” is his repartee. Too quick - spoken like a true Henry - for her wit to match; fringed with implications that are to be kept on the doorstep of those dark firs, grounded outside their portal and her nook of peace. Yet something in her stirs at his words, a pang too harsh not to cause pain that may be hope, or hurt, or the nameless need to search the moss at her feet. “I cannot spot a likeness at all.”

“Not even in this - not in your opinion?”

He hates the eye-locket with an intensity only equalled by his silence as to what passed on the night of its creation. She knows a little from Frederick; enough that she felt the urge to place her mouth where the ivory had touched him, then, and now still. Her lips know the solid dip of Henry’s throat, and he knows the sensation of them better than any suitor ever will. But today, she brings the locket to her own cheek.

“My dear Eleanor! A poet I am not, and not privy to any daffodils’ private ball, but I must have leave to tell a hyacinth from a bluebell.” His finger taps the ivory once, lightly. “Bluebell.” A softer touch to her eyelashes. “Hyacinth. Yours is a deeper, near indigo shade, a unique shade.”

“Believe me, I want to believe you...” 

“You should. You must. And when you give up that tiresome white, I know the precise muslin to match them.”

“... but fear the shadows have misled you.” 

“No,” he says, his fervour reciprocated in the tears that burn her eyes - burn a stronger blue to them. “Never, when they take me to you.”

“Well, then. I have just learnt to love a hyacinth.”

 

* * *

 

The Arabian Nights hold a tale about a palace so vastly rich and so richly vast, that should you wander across its main hall, supported by a thousand pillars, your gaze might travel from one to the next barely recording a change of hue, until you reached the last, red-painted one, and hazily recalled that your peregrination started with a yellow pillar.

The General has no time for such trifles, yet it takes even his acute perception another month, if not a year, to notice that the bluest eye in the household is no longer quite that. It has... darkened, to the General’s ire. It is, the General frowns to himself, positively purplish. Of course, paint will tarnish; and of course, ivory cannot be glazed. Still. He does not have to like it. 

He moves his gaze up his daughter’s neck, sitting at her end of the table, and his heart rocks and hardens with relief. Her eyes are the exact shade of that third eye nestled above her budding breasts, and since she is her mother’s exact semblance, as detected by him long ago, his memory must have failed him. Blast ivory! What need of it, when the counterpart is here, literally in arm’s reach?  

“Miss Tilney is not at home for anybody,” he instructs his manservant later, her arm secured for his walk, his mind already making a motto of his words.

 

* * *

 

It is 1798, year of _Christabel_ and _Wieland_ ; of _The Midnight Bell_ and _The Orphan of the Rhine_. The General has banned any and all Gothick folderol, but Henry, having once taken a subscription to a circulating library, finds that his bed frame can accommodate sixeen in-octavos. When _The Midnight Bell_ fails to show up, he simply burrows under his mattress and takes up _Udolpho_.

The book falls open to his favourite scene, perused so many times that the pages have grown pliant to his love. It is Eleanor’s favourite, too; Henry read it aloud to her during their stolen walks, and later embroidered it, adding many a change or flourish of style to make Eleanor smile.

_At the bottom of the purse was a small packet, having taken out which, and unfolded paper after paper, Emily found to be an ivory case, containing the miniature of a—lady! She started—'The same,' said she, 'he wept over!' On examining the countenance she could recollect no person that it resembled. It was of uncommon beauty, and was characterized by an expression of sweetness, shaded with sorrow, and tempered by resignation. ‘Ah!' said she, taking up the miniature, 'these are her own blue eyes’._

“Henry!”

His father’s call jolts him away from the tender cameo of St. Aubert cherishing the portrait of his lost sister, the Marchioness. (As told by Mrs. Ratcliffe, they never reunite. As re-told by Henry, who much prefers his own version, they find each other again in the beautiful French south, under a canopy of pine trees, and never part, or die, or -)

“ _Henry!_ ”

The impatient crash of his door being flung wide startles him. Down falls the book, to Father’s feet; Father’s hand picks it up. In the flurry of irate, mutually unbridled words that follow, Henry forgets the pine trees. Forgets, even, the book, which vanishes, never to reappear in his quarters - that is, his present quarters.

For... “Woodston?” Eleanor inquires the next evening.

The General, who has shown uncharacteristic calm through the  _soirée_ ’s protocol, now replies cheerfully.

“A mere twenty miles from here. It is time your brother were employed, aye, well employed, and he will not find it amiss to keep a property of his own. I am quite prepared to be generous.” 

Henry bows, keeping his face to the fire. He still burns, not from his father’s words, but from Eleanor’s when the pearls once again travelled from his neck to hers before dinner. _They have taken on your scent_ , Eleanor said, by which she means not his rose-of-attar, but the pungent-soft, elusive note that is all Henry’s. _It comforts me at night_. 

“I shall sign the living over to him next week - with a few provisos. Idle hands will not do for Woodston. The parish is large, and your brother will find plenty to occupy him there until he finds a proper helpmate.”

“But why, may I ask, must he leave us?”

“Bath,” the General cuts in, loud in his cunning. “Quite the matrimonial Exchange, I hear. We might spend half a season here, my dear, for Henry’s sake. Yet not winter; I could never suffer to travel in the snow. No, no time like the present. Let us retire for the night, and then Henry can depart tomorrow to engage some lodgings for us.”

 

* * *

 

That same night, she climbs the back stairs to his chamber, impelled into resolution. He is found pacing, his cravat loosened, his face fiery and vulnerable. _You must_ , she whispers, _you must,_ kissing his mouth, hard and aching. Their arms find each other, orphans in a forest, midnight children, lost and reunited. _Do not_ I am always sorry to leave _me_ , _do not leave me, do not leave_.

“No,” he comforts her lips, “no, no, never”, and, when his are freed against his will, “unless with you, dearest Eleanor.” 

“At all risks, all hazards. Yes.” A hard-found breath. “Perhaps... we can sell my pearls? They will -  at least - the expenses of the journey...”

He kisses her pearls last, leaving the hot sheen of his saliva to quicken their glow. She it is who walks him to the four-poster bed, hiding the core of the kiss, and when they come to that core Eleanor finds but a little pain and a great thirsty joy. She steps out of the white gown but keeps the pearls on, so she can see his dear dark face all the while, the locket clasped between their chests - an amulet, by now, a seal.

When they fall asleep, they dream at one - of pine trees and their leafy shadows, and the sea wind mingling with the shades, and a south that is not South Western England.

 

* * *

 

The General, a sympathetic early riser, catches them at his door.

“Pardon me, Father.” Eleanor’s voice falters, but her eyes, instead of turning to the ground, meet his on the level. “Miss Tilney will no longer be at home.” 

His hands find her neck to be no thicker than her mother’s waist on their wedding-day, and as worthy of his incessant attentions. But the pearls make his grasp slippery, and as he lowers his gaze to them, it locks itself to the ivory portrait and its one eye, dark, darkest, a well of nerves and shadows, _Henry’s eye staring unflinchingly back_.

It wrings one cry from the General - heaved up, three-parts breath - then not enough breath - and then, the rest is darkness.

 

* * *

 

The little fishing town, Ramatuelle, had only entertained a Platonic idea of Englishmen until it came to them in the flesh last September. This roused some trepidation among the locals, although Monsieur and Madame Tilney have proved most charming, not a whit cold or aloof, and both speaking very decent French. Their small muslin business is enough of an income to keep them afloat, and it seems that they are content with the village mores, having no strong inclination for _la grande vie_. Monsieur did make a few odd inquiries about the monks-to-fishermen ratios (zero) and the nearby abandoned castle, but, _hé!_ that’s par with the English eccentricity, and it was obvious from his laughter that he was doing it to tease Madame. They soon became honorary townspeople. Monsieur likes the Sunday dances; Madame likes to dress in the bright local colours (which Monsieur strongly encourages) though she is not one for jewellry, setting aside her inseparable locket. 

Much speculation is spent on the locket - said by some to contain a miniature of the mad King of England, too frightful to be seen - until Madame puts everyone’s minds at rest by opening it herself. Inside is an oval piece of ivory, pure and unadorned, and nothing else.

“A keepsake,” she says simply, “from my brother.”

“What, not even a cameo?” the Mayor’s wife asks, plainly dissatisfied, until Monsieur offers his arm for the next country dance. This is enough to placate her, for Madame’s husband, as she informs Madame upon his escorting her back, is a remarkable dancer, _que oui_.

“Yes, he dances very well,” Madame replies with a smile, gentle and secret, one that kindles a goldbrown flash in Monsieur’s eyes.


End file.
